“Because My Bum Said”

Adam has lived three years and two months on this earth and has figured out many things in his short time here. He knows to say “please” and “thank you.” He knows how to play Diego games on the computer. He knows to get a flashlight and look under the couch when a piece of the map puzzle is missing. And he knows words and concepts that we didn’t teach him, that make us ask, “Where did he learn that?”

“I can’t see what’s over there, Mimi, because the truck is blocking my view,” he said to me last week.

“Blocking my view?” Was this on an episode of Dora?  In “Charlotte’s Web?”   In a book?  Did someone say this to him?

He also knows how to count, all the way to 59, except that sometimes he loops from 39 back to 30 and skips the 40s entirely, which, having lived through both decades, sounds like a brilliant idea.  He can also make connections. He knows that after dinner he’s allowed to have some M&Ms, which he calls “twos” but before dinner he cannot.  So when it’s three in the afternoon and he wants M&Ms, he feigns hunger and asks for macaroni and cheese so that he can have his “twos” sooner.

You’d think the boy would be potty trained. He’s old enough and smart enough and we’ve certainly pleaded enough.

But he is not interested.

Last year, when he was two, his mother, my daughter, went all out to train him. She bought him a blue and white potty at Babies r Us and when he didn’t like it, “It hurts my bum, Mommy,” she bought him a singing potty. And when that didn’t work, she tried this click on thing that attaches to the real potty. But that was a bust, too.

Next came the reward system. “If you just sit on the potty, I’ll give you a sticker,” she said.  So he sat on the potty every day, 20 times a day, until the stickers were gone.

A friend suggested Cheerios. “Not in a bowl. But in the potty. Make a game of it.”

Adam refused to play.

My daughter reads him books. “Dora’s Potty Book.” Caillou’s Potty Time.” They go to the library and read more books. “The Potty Book for Boys.” “Too Big for Diapers.” “Lift the Lid, Use the Potty.”

He continues to use his diaper instead.

She bribed him with big boy pants about six months ago.  Buzz Lightyear.  Nemo.  Diego. Spiderman. Thomas and Friends. They now live in a drawer next to his pull-ups.

“I’m going on the potty,” we say every day, a half dozen times a day, parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and some very good friends. “Do you want to go on the potty, too?”

“No, thank you,” Adam tells us.

He goes to nursery school two mornings a week now. The teachers there do not change diapers. So his mother gets called.  She walks into his classroom door, takes him to another room, changes him, then walks him back.

None of this phases him.

“When did you do the poopies, Adam?” she asked him one day when she arrived.

“When I was playing cars with Richie,” he told her.

“But why did you do the poopies in your pants, Adam?”

“Because my bum said, ‘Do poopies.’”

I laughed when she told me this. And she laughed too, but not for long. “I don’t know what to do next, Mom. I think I’ve tried everything.”

Everything except a potty party, the idea behind “Potty Train Your Child in a Day” a book by Teri Crane, which the author sent me last year.  Readers of the book - in Barnes & Noble and Amazon on-line reviews – insist that having a potty party works. One mother wrote, “Before reading this book I truly thought I would be sending my son off to college with his jumbo box of Pampers.” 

But my daughter refuses to have a party to celebrate something that has yet to happen.

“Forty-percent of three-year-olds still use diapers,” I tell her supportively. I don’t believe this statistic but I share it anyway.

My friend Jill tells her that her son, who is now 30 and a weatherman, wasn’t trained until he was four. “It does eventually happen,” she says. But my daughter doesn’t want to hear eventually. She wants to hear now.  

“It’s time to use the potty, Adam,” she says firmly.

“No, thank you, Mommy. 

“I’ll give you some twos,” she begs. “I’ll take you to the mall and you can ride in the flying cars.

“No, thank you.”

I think we have made the poopies - no matter where they happen to land - way too much fun for Adam. I think we have tried so hard not to make him feel embarrassed or ashamed, that’s it’s worked. He isn’t embarrassed or ashamed or even uncomfortable so why would he altar his routine? He pees. He poops. And we quickly change him. We even sing to him! (Yes, we sing poopie songs.)

The boy has it made. He has US trained.

And, boy, how he knows it!